


Forever and Always (a Wallflower)

by threadtheneedle_13



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Death, Keith (Voltron) is a Mess, Lance (Voltron) tries, Leave if you came for a happy ending lol, M/M, Sorry Not Sorry, Super angsty, character death before plotline, my angsty 3am soup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-26 20:08:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20032927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threadtheneedle_13/pseuds/threadtheneedle_13
Summary: “Keith, there’s a whole world out there, a world that would get so much if you just startedliving in it.. So… that’s why…” Lance’s voice wobbled, “you can’t come and see me anymore. I’m holding you back.”





	Forever and Always (a Wallflower)

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my corner. I wrote this at ass o'clock in the morning and I'm too scared to edit, so watch out for typos and spelling mistakes and super long sentences that go on forever because who even knows how to use a full stop...  
Deja vu, know what I'm saying?  
Okay. I'll go away now. Have fun :)

As usual, it was Varadero Beach. A sprawling expanse of white-capped waves and shimmering stretches of gold, dotted with the sink-holes of heavy footfalls and the clustered bristles of swaying palm trees as they cast stripped shadows over unevenly spread beach towels.  
  
Keith shielded his eyes from the familiar onslaught of the sun, blinking away the molted phosphenes that swam over his vision. The sand smoldered under his bare feet, but he knew it would leave no visible redness or post-friction burn. He watched it trickle between his toes in tiny cascades.  
  
The ocean roared and spayed a fountain of milky foam into air. Keith would have had to walk several paces to even run a finger through the residing mist, but he winced regardless.  
  
It was quiet, for a beach, but Keith’s ears felt strangely echoey, reverberating and amplifying the sounds into a fever pitch  
  
Breathing through his mouth to avoid the thick sharpness of the brine, Keith began to count.  
  
_One, two…_  
  
The haze of quivering air parted for a moment and Keith’s throat seized, just like ever other time.  
  
_Three, four…_  
  
Spread-eagle in the sand, a pair of tacky sunglasses perched within loose, winsome hair, miles of tan skin glistening beneath layers of slathered sunscreen, closed eyes and angular brows and a flash of teeth from between thin lips…  
  
It always came down to five, didn’t it?  
  
Keith tilted his head to the boundless blue and swallowed the stinging lump in his chest.  
  
“Lance,”  
  
Lance slid open a languid eyelid, sun-saturated and droopy, fastening his gaze onto a severely out of place Keith with his dark jeans sloppily rolled hallway up his shin and his gloved hands fiddling nervously with the hem of an even darker t-shirt.  
  
“Keith!”  
  
Lance swung upright, looking genuinely happy to see him although Keith couldn’t imagine why. Even so, that voice; liquid and smiling and just as expressive as ever, washed waves of warmth over him like the sun never could. He sighed and dropped down next to Lance, hating the way he couldn’t do anything else even if he wanted too.  
  
Something that felt suspiciously like guilt and sounded a lot like what Pidge might call ‘clinging misery’ muscled its way through Keith’s veins so fast a familiar prickling pain clawed itself up to nestle behind his eyelids.  
  
Lance reached for his hand and intertwined their fingers, warm and solid against his frigid palm. Keith could smell suntan lotion and salted caramel. He inhaled shakily.  
  
“How’ve you been?”  
  
Lance’s voice was gentle, intermingling with the ocean like he knew how hard this was for Keith.  
  
“Same old,” Keith answered, clearing his throat and squeezing Lance’s hand that little bit tighter. “Pidge and Hunk finally let Marco try the foodgoo.”  
  
Lance’s eyes glazed, looking backwards through his memories with the ghost of smile playing over his face.  
  
“I remember when we first tried it.”  
  
Despite himself, Keith felt his lips twitch. “I don’t think we were doing much trying.”  
  
They had been too busy flinging lumps of shiny green around the room, laughing and dodging and gripping each other’s forearms around the Altean handcuffs.  
  
“Yeah, I was too busy beating your sorry ass.”  
  
“We… were on the same team?”  
  
“Ah bu _bu,_” Lance leaned forward, finger pressed to Keith’s lips. Up close, Keith could see every dancing flare curling over his iris. “I won. Fabulously.”  
  
It was how they had always been. Keith and Lance, neck-in-neck, pulled inexplicably into each other’s orbits no matter how far they strayed, two, untamable sparks in the cosmos, spinning alongside the galaxies and witnessing every event, every moment as each other’s constant variables.  
  
That was how it _should_ have been.  
  
Keith grinned, feeling his skin tighten as if pulled by strings. He hadn’t smiled in a while. “You did _not._”  
  
“Whatever helps you sleep at night, Emoboy.”  
  
“I don’t think I’ve heard that one before.”  
  
“Mhm, I thought of it myself. I think the vibrancy of your wardrobe and the sunniness of your disposition,” he gestured to Keith’s general person, “inspired my choice.”  
  
“What happened to Mullet?”  
  
“A term of endearment.”  
  
“Genuine endearment?”  
  
In stark juxtaposition, Lance’s smile glittered, softening in the summer, all hazily peaked and eye-crinkling.  
  
He nudged Keith’s shoulder. “I’ll let you decide.”  
  
Time slipped away between the persistent, lapping undulations of the sapphire-swirled waves, the gathering of cloud wisps in pallets of watered-down pinks and chipped, blushing oranges, beneath the gentle drop of the sun’s rays as is sank behind the rippling line of the horizon, within the swapped stories and reminiscent nostalgia of moments and memories that had been.  
  
Keith let Lance run tentative fingers over the curving scar on his cheek.  
  
Lance let Keith trace the messy sprawl of white on his lower back from that explosion so very long ago, when Keith had held his hand for the first time, felt the warmth of skin through the thick coverings of gloves.  
  
Lance taught Keith how to weave the friendship bracelets his niece and nephew had given him, while he fiddled with the ends of Keith’s inky black hair, laced with flecks of sand.  
  
Lance, like always, asked about their friends. Keith obliged, telling him about Hunk’s progress with Shay, Pidge and her brother zooming after the scent of mischief through the universe in a fighter jet, of how the once tightly-knit unit of Lance’s family was gradually getting stronger again, painstakingly tugging back the seams and flaps of the snarling tapestry of their world. He talked about how Shiro was steadily getting over his PTSD through pet therapy and talking, particularly to Keith’s mother.  
  
Reluctantly, Keith told Lance how some nights (all nights) were just as hard. How he sometimes shook like a leaf out of nowhere, or how he could barely talk to refugee aliens without thinking frantically to himself your home is gone, destroyed, scattered into an indifferent universe, and having to turn away before he collapsed, how he dragged himself from breathtakingly vivid nightmares thinking the sweat dripping from his hands was not sweat at all, but blood, and how he clawed himself to the bathroom to empty the merge contents of his stomach into that familiar dreaded bowl of white porcelain.  
  
Lance ran a thumb over Keith’s knuckles, the line of his cheekbone, the column of his neck until Keith had run himself ragged and lay back on the blanket, feeling empty and oddly light.  
  
They sat in silence for a while, watching pinprick spirals of stars wink themselves into existence over the darkening ocean. Really, Keith thought wryly, you shouldn’t be able to see the stars in a Cuban sky.  
  
“Why didn’t we ever do this before?”  
  
Another routine question. Always initiated by Keith and dutifully answered with the same response.  
  
“Well, you were stubborn, I was stubborn…” Lance sounded tired. Of course he would be.  
  
“I wish I hadn’t been.” Keith murmured, uncharacteristically lacking his usual, quietly simmering passion.  
  
Lance pressed his side against Keith’s. “Nah, I think arguing kept me from going crazy on that ship. I would have been a _vrepit sa_ motherfucker a long time ago otherwise.”  
  
Keith huffed a laugh. He knew what Lance was talking about. Their arguments had always been a give-to-take kind of battle; dealing the first card and trusting that the other would dig their heels in appropriately. Maybe they never changed until it was too late because they thought it would destroy the only reliably consistent aspect of their lives, what with fighting fuzzy purple aliens every other hour.  
  
There was a pregnant pause.  
  
Surprising even himself, a hoarse whisper slithered out from between Keith’s lips, like a sin. Like he was trying to hide it from the tide or the shells, lest they have ears to hear it. Lance wouldn’t have heard it if he had been focusing on anything other than the quiet rise and fall of Keith’s chest.  
  
“I wish… I wish could have been there. When you… you know.”  
  
Lance’s arms tightened around him.  
  
“I was _supposed_ to be there… you’re my right hand, I could have stopped–”  
  
“Keith,” Lance said wearily, as if this was an old argument. Perhaps it was. Maybe even inside Lance’s own head.  
  
“Even you had been there, it wouldn’t have made a difference. If you hadn’t been back at that base, we wouldn’t have won the war. _Everyone_ would be gone.”  
  
“But I didn’t even get to – Lance, I lo–”  
  
Lance clamped a hand over Keith’s mouth, cutting off both the stream of words and the twin rivulets of water that were just poised to trickle down Keith’s cheeks.  
  
Keith fought the urge to scrub at his eyes angrily.  
  
“Don’t say it.”  
  
Lance’s voice was low and tense, like it had sounded through their coms in the heat of battle, when Keith managed to pin him down and kiss him until there was no oxygen left in both of them, when they used to form Voltron, powerful and impenetrable, and Keith drew their sword.  
  
When there was something to fight for.  
  
Lance’s eyes were heavy with fear.  
  
“You _can’t_ say it.”  
  
Keith gripped Lance’s wrist and pushed it away.  
  
“Why?” he snapped, “I mean it. Lance you don’t get it, you give my life _value–_”  
  
“Think about what you just said,” Lance interrupted quietly, staring blankly down at the whorls and spirals the wind carved in the sand.  
  
As abruptly as he had risen, Keith tumbled down to reality. His world felt like a sheet of glass, fragile, and before this entirely apart from this pocket in which he and Lance existed in suspension. Now, it was crumbling steadily, trailing tiny, glittering bits of himself behind him. He had turned his back to the hairline fractures splaying themselves over it in grinning, spiderwebbed roads, and now faced the inevitable result.  
  
Because of _course._  
  
Because he couldn’t tell Lance. He couldn’t tell Lance that even before this, Lance had dragged Keith from his island into a family, something Keith hadn’t even know he had wanted until it was his. That even before this, Lance had been the unshakable center of a spinning universe, a beacon that shone with light and hope and snarks of humor and willful encouragement wrapped in the ire of competition. Couldn’t, even though Lance had shared his lion, shot his foes from the sky, saved his life more times than Keith had cared to count. Keith couldn’t tell Lance that he loved the way Lance’s bottom lip disappeared between gnawing teeth when he was thinking, the way Lance’s eyes lit up when he spoke about his family, the way he flipped the pillow over in the middle of the night like he couldn’t help himself, the way he spend hours on his skin but would then drag a frustrated hand over his face when Keith quipped back a particularly witty insult. Keith couldn’t tell Lance that when he smiled, Keith saw galaxies.  
  
Lance had always been unreachable; a golden star that should’ve shied away from Keith’s creeping darkness. But he had stuck around. One of the only ones that had stayed sticking, in fact. But if there was ever a time when Lance had been further from Keith’s reach, it was now.  
  
Keith never cried. He didn’t cry when his mother a dropped a kiss on the top of his head and then vanished from his life like she had never been there. He hadn’t cried when the strange men in blue uniforms had come to tell him that the fire had swallowed up his father. He didn’t cry when he had hurt, been hurt, killed, or watched others die. He cried now.  
  
Salty, bubbling tears, the kind that stung the throat in fat lumps and squeezed themselves from stinging eyes, the kind that shook the shoulders and trembled the body but made his chest too tight to make any sound. Lance held him like he might piece Keith back together if he squeezed tight enough. The shoulder of Keith’s shirt was hot and damp with Lance’s own tears, crying not for himself. Never for himself.  
  
His head sang an unhelpful mantra, a low, lovers lament of _not real not real not real._  
  
Nothing was real. Not here.  
  
Eventually, the shuddering waves retreated, leaving Keith with a gaping, oozing wound in his chest that he was sure would leave a scar when, if, it scabbed over. _That_ was real.  
  
“Have I ever told you,” Keith dimly registered Lance’s voice through the muddled fog that clouded his mind, “about the first time I flew Red?”  
  
Keith’s lack of answer was answer enough.  
  
“I felt really bad, actually. Felt like I was stealing your girl.” Lance sniffled, face still buried in Keith’s collarbone, Keith still hiding in Lance’s shoulder.  
  
“But I stepped in anyway, feeling all weird in my blue suit, and it was just… you.”  
  
Keith lifted his head, jaw aching and eyes glistening, vision blurring as the flood works began to teeter again. Lance stared down at his fingers curling in his lap, forehead still pressed to Keith’s neck.  
  
“Like, I could feel you. Stubborn. So stubborn,” he laughed in the direction of his hands, still clenching and unclenching around each other.  
  
“Passionate. Brave. Fast and strong, reckless, so fucking _hotheaded._ And… I don’t know, you had been at the blade for so long and you came back sort of watered-down, I just… I had forgotten what you felt like,” Keith felt Lance breath shakily against his skin.  
  
“It was amazing. _You_ are amazing. But you’re stuck here, with some guy who can’t give you a fraction of what you deserve.”  
  
Keith could see where this was going, and he wasn't about to watch this fall apart.  
  
“You don’t understand,” Keith said desperately, “I want _you_.”  
  
Lance laughed again, a hollow sound that made Keith see grey.  
  
Where on earth had he, emotionally stunted, lone wolf Keith, learnt to feel this much? He wanted it to go away. He wanted the pain to die. He, of all people though, should have known that the universe was only kind to its favourites. And a favourite Keith was not.  
  
“I want you too. That’s the problem; I want you too much, and I’m not supposed to want _anything_ from this life anymore, right? Right?” Like he was waiting for Keith to agree with him.  
  
Keith didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand, but his silence was his mistake.  
  
“Keith, there’s a whole world out there, a world that would get so much if you just started _living in it._ So… that’s why…” Lance’s voice wobbled, “you can’t come and see me anymore. I’m holding you back.”  
  
Keith’s sheet of glass crashed at his feet. It had taken him so much time to put himself back together, and what good had that done? He slumped down next to Lance, a hopeless pile of loose strings.  
  
Something fundamental was broken in his chest. Shards of it pierced him with each breath.  
  
It hurt, worse than anything had ever hurt.  
  
Heartbreak, he realized numbly.  
  
Lance’s arms when they held him this time were not a sating balm, were not the peace that love had promised in the stories Keith had read as a child. They were a lack-luster finale that left more than just a bitter taste in Keith’s mouth.  
  
Lance was speaking.  
  
“You’re gonna have a great life Keith. You’ll get out of here, go give Pidge a giant hug from me, go eat a pile of Hunk’s comfort food, and you’re gonna sit with Shiro and get back whatever made you brothers, do you hear me?”  
  
Keith heard, alright. He heard the broken of sob at the end, heard the crack in Lance’s voice as he pushed through the new bout of tears.  
  
“You’ll… you’ll maybe travel space again, or you’ll stay on earth– whatever you want. And… maybe you’ll meet a new guy who can go where you go and get you coffee and flowers. Maybe you’ll get a kid. Or two.”  
  
Lance shuddered with the force of fresh sadness as Keith listened to this blow-by-blow of a life without Lance. His own breath was stuttered, his hands shaking, brightly-coloured images pouring through his mind; a faceless husband, a spaceship trailing sparks behind him, the weight of a body in his arms…  
  
“Why can’t you be the guy?” Keith asked frantically. “Why can’t I stay?”  
  
Lance didn’t answer. All had already been said.  
  
The place beneath Keith’s breastbone throbbed with acute pain, burning itself into a brand. An open sore.  
  
“I love you, space cadet.”  
  
Keith didn’t have the energy to tell Lance that made him a hypocrite.  
  
“What happened… to Emoboy?” Keith breathed against Lance’s skin, his voice thick with unshed tears.  
  
Lance just gathered him up and pressed their mouths together in a firm, bruising kiss, like the one they should’ve had when they defeated the Galra, if they had gotten married, shared a child, at New Years and Christmas and every time and all the time.  
  
Keith’s hands flew up to cup Lance’s cheeks, damp with both of their sadness.  
  
It lasted for a thousand years but ended too quickly.  
  
Lance was the first to retreat, leaving Keith to chase after the warmth, the light that had been ripped away.  
  
Keith waited, waited for his heart to get the message, for his endless feelings to dissolve into nothingness. Kept waiting.  
  
Lance smiled, a quivery thing, trembling and aching but unendingly precious. Keith drank in the sight, a man dying of thirst, drowning in a salty sea.  
  
He leaned forward this time, holding Lance close, reveling in the pretend body heat and feel of him under his fingertips.  
  
His chest smarted.  
  
“I love you too, Lance.”  
  
Lance dug his fingers into Keith’s back.  
  
“I’ll see you again,” he told Keith, “somewhere. And you can tell me all about everything.”  
  
Keith nodded, letting himself, just for a second, let the lies try and glue him back together.  
  
“And Keith?”  
  
Keith looked up, stamping that precious face with its ski-jump nose and pillow soft baby hair around the temples forever onto the back of his eyelids.  
  
Forever and always.  
  
“Thanks for not storing me on a paper aeroplane.”  
  
And he disappeared, along with the beach, in a shower of blue sparks, leaving Keith, cold once again, on the steel floor of the castle deck.  
  
The brightness of the beach lingered behind his eyelids.

**Author's Note:**

> You know what's better than fic good? Fic done.


End file.
